Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume
VIII, National Security Policy

5. Editorial Note

On January 26, 1961, members of the team that had prepared WSEG Report No. 50, “Evaluation of Strategic
Offensive Weapons Systems,” dated December 27, 1960, gave Secretary
McNamara a briefing on the
Report. WSEG-50 concluded that
intercontinental ballistic missiles would be the most effective strategic
weapons by the mid-1960s, that “counterforce alone [did] not appear to be a
high confidence measure for preventing unacceptable levels of damage to the
U.S. in the event of war,” even if the United States struck first, and that
the United States “should be able to maintain a strong retaliatory posture
even in the face of threats larger by far than any indicated by intelligence
estimates.” Therefore “both the U.S. and the Soviet Union should be able to
maintain a retaliatory force capable of inflicting great damage, which
cannot be neutralized by the other side without a major technological
breakthrough.”

In the face of this “nuclear stalemate,” the United States should “develop
and maintain a retaliatory force that clearly can do high levels of damage”
regardless of how a war started, and should also reduce “the threat of use
of strategic forces to issues that can be resolved in no other way.” To this
end, the United States with its allies should “develop and deploy forces to
meet local aggression locally, and in such a manner as to minimize the
expansion of the limited war into general war.” The summary [Page 15]portion of WSEG-50 is attached to a March 3 covering note from Colonel
Benjamin C. Chapla, of the Joint Staff, to McGeorge Bundy in the Kennedy Library,
National Security Files, Bromley
Smith Series. For a description of McNamara's briefing based on interview
materials, see Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), pages 258-262.